Is the Guardian worse than it used to be?

Ubisoft used her (and dunty lol) as some of the in-game political podcasters in their Dystopian London game, then panicked when people pointed out what a dumb bigot she is - I don't think she was ever an dedicated gaming podcaster though she possibly did a podcast about how poor people don't know what coffee is at some point?

Also, when reviewing Labour’s arts policy she wrote ‘don’t encourage them, Jeremy...’

xp she tried to own actual professional gamer SonicFox and it was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D5QJA1jUUAEDbup?format=jpg&name=large

SonicFox for president btw

”if only we had our own AOC in the UK”

Nice headline here from the guardian reporting on AOC basically begging the dems to all work together instead of being factional. She’d be absolutely torn to shreds if she was an MP.

I'm puzzled by Lewis's entry into the world of computer games. It's not something about which I would have expected her - or indeed Dunt - to have very deep knowledge.

politics and media are dominated by people talking vaguely authoritatively about things they have barely thought about and have little more than a passing interest in

she clearly doesn't

i'm guessing they were sourced as "representative" UK podcasters to form part of the game's ambient soundworld. as i understand it the game is set in a dystopian hellscape so this feels like good casting

if i were post-fash antifa battling the cyberforces of future evil i would simply turn off the imitation remainiacs podcast

I am going to get accused of "liking Helen Lewis" again, but 10 seconds googling suggests that she writes about them quite a bit

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2012/11/why-are-we-still-so-bad-talking-about-video-games

(and also, we're of the age when an appreciable percentage of 'normal' people will be video game fans)

but as she admits, she is bad at talking about them

xp if the shoe fits

why dont u just marry her

I’d suggest that writing about games and knowing about games are not quite the same, and that perhaps condescending to a professional gamer about his lack of skill isn’t the best way to demonstrate it either?

tbh the exchange with the gamer meant literally nothing to me

She’s basically calling someone who’s good enough to play fighting games professionally, to the point they make a very decent living from it, a scrub lol. It’s like them dismissing her work with “I’ve scribbled out more coherent shit on my dream journal “, except their argument would have more merit.

(i was checking the Wikipedia page and realised they came out as nb last year).

Anyway, their best eplayer award speech is the best.

I'm pretty appalled that @guardian would run an obituary of a serial killer. What did he achieve that is worthy of such recognition? pic.twitter.com/fSS8QfuWdq

— Hallie Rubenhold (@HallieRubenhold) November 14, 2020

even the appalling tory rag The Yorkshire Post put his victims on the cover rather than a photo of the serial killer as a young man, like he's some kind of fucking matinee idol.

I’m fine with an obit, written by one of the best crime reporters in the world, about one of the most twisted criminals ever.

He was a significant part of the life of the country - recognition isn't an inherently positive term, nor is an obituary.

xp
well yeah, but not many elusive master crims (of the non-murdering/sex-offender ilk) are thick enough to think knicking reg-plates from Cooper Bridge Motors is how you evade the police!

very London-centric takes. I'll beg to differ.

"a significant part of the life of the country" that's one bullshit way of putting it.

looking at DC's True Crime bibliography (including a Billy Connoly biography!) none of it looks like it would stand up next Happy Like Murderers by Gordon Burn, so perhaps standards are slipping!

anyway my final take is if this grubby white van man dullard who murdered loads of women gets a full page obit, then cancel culture still has a lot of work to do.

the idea that giving someone an obituary is automatically seen as an accolade is weird to me. but I guess the guardian have muddied the waters a little by introducing this 'other lives' section where guardian readers celebrate their late family members and friends:

https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/series/otherlives

it looks like there wasn't one published this Friday, so at least they avoided printing an obituary of someone's beloved granny appearing next to Peter Sutcliffe

if one of your obscure but dead uncles or aunts got a full page obit in one of the national broadsheets, wouldn't you think such recognition was an accolade of sorts? There is already enough been written about this arsehole, probably mostly of the sensationalist style of murderer fan-fic ilk, who needs a respectable obit as well?

Hi Calzino. When seeing objectionable things on social media, it's really important to look for the context.

Not to play Captain-Save-a-Guardian (I am well aware of their failings and shortcomings) but I was reading the website throughout the day (very boring meetings) and that specific piece was about the 3rd or 4th piece down a large subsection that concentrated mostly on the victims, the survivors, the toxic police attitudes. It was a small piece to provide context, a tiny piece of their total coverage.

This has the chronology of their coverage here, which documents how the news unfolded:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/peter-sutcliffe

At the first news, there was a small piece focusing on the victims and their families, and whether his death brought them "closure". Then there was a small piece of coverage of the police's apology to the families, again centring the victims. Then there was the main story, the headline piece: an in-depth long-read on the toxic misogyny and hatred of sex workers and how and why the police bungled the investigation so badly. That was a pretty good piece, it provided a lot of context, many interviews with contemporary women, including survivors, feminist protesters, representatives from the English Collective of Prostitutes. Then, four pieces down, the obituary (which is hardly the glamourisation that Rubenhold portrays - again it focuses mostly on police incompetence). Then a final summing up of the news, which again focuses mostly on the victims.

Then today, I can see (but haven't yet read) an op-ed on whether police treatment of female victims, sex workers, has or hasn't changed (I have learned not to judge columnists' tone by the headlines or subs, which they don't write.)

Selectively taking one small piece out of a whole, and representing it as the whole story is sensationalising and shoddy practice, no matter what the topic. Maybe try to evaluate and confirm stories on social media before sharing them?

respectfully BB I still agree with tweet I shared, despite whatever else of value the Graun has done in their Sutcliffe coverage, it makes no difference to me. I grew up in genuine childhood fear that this guy might murder my mum every time she went to work on an evening, so perhaps sometimes agreeing with a sentiment expressed on social doesn't require "confirmation and evaluation" when you know how you feel about something and you know you have a extremely implacable position on it! Anyway fuck this guy and the Graun!

Even the bbc covered the misogyny towards sex workers by WYP, the Graun isn't exactly an outlier here.

That obituary reads like a crib notes version of his Wikipedia page.

his have very sensationalist ross Kemp/danny dyer type titles! That's why I mentioned the Gordon Burn book. He goes so deep into the lives of the victims - you can be reading for hours and forget you are even reading about a murderer.

his books

Calz, one of the things I know - from studying how propaganda and disinformation and conspiracy brainworms - specifically with the aim of trying to trying to mitigate and temper my own extreme emotional reactions to emotive topics?

It’s that stuff that *does* trigger those extremely primal fear reactions, that you have to interrogate the hardest. Something that hits you on that kind of emotive level *does* (and is sometimes intended to!) override your rational and intellectual and contextual responses.

The bigger the emotive kick, the more important it is to train oneself to look for the actual context and source.

Let me have my *what is apparently a controp to amongst you sophisticates of Londonium* and characterising it as a brainworm is a bit insulting and wrong to me. All I'm saying is I have issues with the Graun getting some hack crime-writer in to do a respectable obit of someone just as despicable as anyone you'd find in the paedo wing of monster mansion. There is nothing to interrogate here. I disagree with some of you lot and there are some cultural/class differences at play here, no biggie!

it's too soon as well, there aren't Stepney Green style murder heritage walks in W Yorkshire.

I don’t think you have a brainworm- in fact I don’t even think that this woman has an agenda - however I DO notice she has a book to promote!

Using the death of one serial killer to promote a book about the victims of another serial killer is an... interesting ethical choice!

The thing is - I don’t have a problem with that when people are up front about what they are doing! Kate Manne talking about misogyny and rape culture in a recent election, then going “hey, I literally wrote a book on this exact subject, here’s an excerpt” or Whitney Phillips going “hey - internet conspiracy theories - here’s a link to my research?” - fair enough!

This woman representing the Guardian’s coverage as the exact OPPOSITE of what it was - if you’d read beyond her screengrab, you wouldn’t be talking about ‘London media bias’ in the 4 or 5 other pieces on the subject - to push your emotive buttons to get you to increase her profile off the back of your pain and grievances?

Don’t you find that kind of emotive misrepresentation a little manipulative? Because I would. Maybe you don’t - in which case fair play!

well that sounds fair enough, there are so many arsehole blueticks on with shameless book plugging agendas, the only practicable way to avoid becoming party to their game is to block all blueticks tbf!

I didn't mean to rub you up the wrong way, calzino - they've done obituaries for Osama Bin Laden, for Hindley and Brady - not doing one would seem to me to be more "oh it's just local news" - but I'm not from Yorkshire so I should shut up.

(I'm not a Londoner any more, but since I moved to Edinburgh my grounds for remonstration are reduced)

lol no probs AF. I've got onto a bit of a problematic hill here with lots of windy paths and traps and tripwires around it so fuck knows anymore! But don't be dissing my main man OBL!

seems like one could have run all the other articles without also running an obituary

like if one was going to take seriously the relationship between news, celebrity and gender-based-violence one could consider what kinds of articles to run and what kinds of articles to refrain from running. then it wouldn't be a case of having to mitigate the problematic inclusion of an obituary with other articles that use a different lens. you could simply rethink how this is reported.

the publishing of an obituary is not a natural event that happens by itself and a news source like the guardian could decide to rethink those conventions on the understanding that there might be all kinds of worrying things about celebrity and violence and what makes one 'notable' (the murderer but not the victim) that are perpetuated through these editorial conventions.

I'm glad to be not the only one that thinks the obit is wrong.

ever since about 1988 when I first started seeing the Murder Casebook (gotta collect 'em all!) on the top shelf of the local newsagents, next to the jazzmags. I've had a bad feeling about this creeping celebritization of murderers and how some of them seem to attain obituary in the Graun status because .. why Idk? I went to school with a serial killer who possibly won't get a Graun obit. What is the lesson here? to become a killer with real cultural cache/infamy and get guest appearances in David Peace novels - you just have kill more people!

prurient moatification was always already central to the newstrade: pamphlets in the 1800s abt the red barn murder or last (very made-up) regretful words of the hanged villain cranked out in the seven dials yellow pressed (often simply reusing the illustrations from a previous story bcz #whocare)

Oh I know this old thing, but I just meant seeing Murder Casebook was when the 16 year old me became aware of it but I think I was probably wrongly thinking about it as part of the vulgar Americanisation of things, rather than as a innoble tradition!

I do post in English sometimes as well

I think at the time I was thinking something like Ted Bundy being a celeb murderer on the television, defending himself in court etc was quite shocking and not very cool at all, but all very American of course and wouldn't occur in the UK because our glorious fourth estate are too serious and sensible to elevate murderers to celeb status. That was a naive tbf.

tbf the adventures of Donald Nielson regularly plastered across the front of the Express & Star is one of my first memories of newspapers

My mum had fake leather stool that also doubled as a storage box that had some newspapers she possibly still has somewhere, from different periods of the hunt for the ripper and reportage on his court case. This fule called Sputnik who is one of my partner's ex-boyfriends was part of the baying lynch mob photographed outside Dewsbury cop shop when he was arrested!

My dad got taken to the cop shop as a YR suspect once, my mum said he was more relieved they seemed concerned with eliminating him as a murder suspect rather than asking him to blow into a bag!